Starting Slowly With The New Year Feels Great and Leads to Clearer Thinking

There is a temptation to dive into the new year at full speed. If you are not juggling at least three ambitious resolutions, crushing them all, you are perceived to be blowing it.

What if you took the opposite approach and started the new year as slowly as possible?

I don’t mean it in a lazy way. More like - what if the first week or two of January is a planning / thinking time, before the perceived “starting gun” of serious hustle begins? That seems like it could be a great strategy.

Starting Slow

Beginning the new year slowly is counterintuitive because everybody around you will appear to be hustling. In today’s social media culture everybody’s Facebook and Instagram posts will be like “Look at me drinking a healthy juice and exercising at 6am! Just loving life.”

It’s like a collective game of humblebrag chicken as everybody stampedes towards greatness. The only question is, where are they going?

We all know most of those resolutions end up falling apart by February. The more someone feels compelled to humblebrag on social media about their new exercise/yoga/kale routine, the less likely they are to stick with it.

It reminds me of a phenomenon I used to experience in high school and college.

Inevitably at the beginning of each semester I was über optimistic about the future. I believed that I could do all my homework way ahead of time, pay great attention in class, and generally excel as an A+ student.

Except it never worked that way - within a week I would feel and act like my normal self.

New Year Resolutions are the same way… the feeling of empowerment, ”I can do this!”, which occurs during a dubious time.

We shouldn’t set our New Year’s Resolutions, or ANY goals, during a holiday vacation week when we’re comfortable, fat, and happy. Our mindset is not going to be realistic, we aren’t going to pick good goals.

The first two weeks of the year are way better for goal setting. As the world revs back into gear, it’s easier to imagine what your life will actually look like depending on the goals you set.

And It Feels Great

I feel like a mastermind planning out my next moves.

Right now I’m in a cafe typing out this post, thinking ahead to some of the other creative work I want to do soon. I know what my projects are, I feel organized. The path ahead looks challenging, but I can clearly see where I think I’m going and I feel prepared to receive positive and negative feedback as I go.

The ideas are coming together slowly. I keep improving upon my old goal ideas, making them more measurable and powerful.

It’s all about figuring out where the first domino is… the one that will tip all the others. You can spend a long time tipping over one domino at a time, but if you just start at the right place, they all go down. This is a big part of what I’m slowly mulling over - which task is that first domino?

It’s nerdy but it really works. At least so far I’m coming to much clearer ideas about how to approach the new year… and usually by now I’d be flustered, overcompensating for my desire to have a great 2018 by working too many hours a day and draining my energy.

The slow start feels a lot better.

Of course I’m lucky that steem and SBD pumped which is giving me way more leverage to control my time and spend it in this slower, longer term way.

And even with that all going on, I still have a bunch of work stacked up after the holidays… my queue of Steem posts is nearly depleted, I gotta replenish it, and meanwhile my musical mind is awakening with immense ideas that will soon demand my attention.

It isn’t about avoiding the work. Just easing into it a little bit, so one can think.

How are you starting 2018?